Abstract: The creation of controlled medical terminologies is a central challenge in the
development of electronic patient records. In the T-Helper patient-record
system, which has been designed for the care of patients with HIV infection, a
module known as IVORY allows health-care workers to compose textual progress
notes by making selections from menus that the system generates automatically
from a controlled medical terminology. Construction of the IVORY vocabulary has
required extensive design sessions with a team of computer scientists and an
expert physician. Refinement of the vocabulary was possible only when the
design team could envision how the completed T-Helper system would be used in
the context of clinical practice. Development of controlled medical
terminologies is a problem in knowledge acquisition. Techniques used to acquire
and represent clinical concepts for the purpose of building decision-support
systems also are appropriate for the construction of controlled vocabularies
such as the one in T-Helper.

Notes: Also appears in Proceedings of the IMIA Working Group 6 Conference on Natural Language Processing
Updated April 1995.